One last question. Why should you care? Simple. The more you understand your own hosting infrastructure, the more control you have over it. This not only puts you in a position to potentially lower your total cost of ownership (TCO), it makes you more IT agile.

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A ‘Right-Sized’ Hosting Infrastructure

When you hear the term hosting infrastructure, you’re hearing a catch-all term for the organizational chart of your hosted services. In particular, your website, your email, and your database(s).

The first categorization associated with hosting infrastructure is managed or unmanaged. An unmanaged (or self-managed) hosted service is one in which an outside provider provides the OS and the server space and your organization is responsible for installing, managing, and maintaining your own applications and services.

You provide the groceries and make the meal. They provide the kitchen. Okay, it’s not the world’s best metaphor, but you get the idea.

With managed hosting, the provider not only provides the OS and the server space, they provide all the applications and services—they also take responsibility for maintaining your ecosystem (patches, updates, etc.) and providing security (encryption, redundancies, etc.).

They provide the kitchen, the groceries, and deal with the cleanup. You just cook.

While the public cloud model and shared hosting are the most economical—think of it as a timeshare as opposed to owning a condo—private clouds and dedicated services are going to be the most secure.

Beyond the obvious—namely web hosting, email, and server space—managed hosts may provide desktop as a service (DaaS), software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).

DaaS is a cloud-based virtual desktop environment that provides a single, streamlined computing platform that is accessed by end users through a network. In a third-party provider model, the hosting service is typically responsible for data storage, back-up, maintenance, security, and upgrades.

Similarly, SaaS and PaaS are both cloud-based distribution models designed to defray the cost of similar in-house solutions by servicing a number of clients simultaneously. SaaS provides software over a network, while PaaS provides both software and specialized hardware over a network.

Consider TCO for Hosting Infrastructure

With so many products, solutions, environments, categories, services, kinds of services, and service tiers, it’s hard to keep track. But, it’s important to keep track of your hosting infrastructure and to consolidate your hosting infrastructure when possible.

Why?

The most obvious reason is TCO. Outside of major corporations, in-house solutions are economically impractical. Coupled with build costs and the physical space requirements, in-house solutions require constant monitoring, maintenance, upgrades, and employees to do the work, all of which comes at a price. A managed hosting provider will inevitably (especially long-term) reduce your TCO.

Beyond TCO, however, a good understanding of your own hosting infrastructure makes your organization more agile. Whether your organization wants to react to the market quickly, keep its uptime high, or pivot, knowing what services are hosted where and how they function. That’s agility. Additionally, having a single provider makes getting a grip on hosting infrastructure that much easier.

Your organization needs to have a clear picture of what you’re hosting, who you’re hosting it with, and how that vendor structures their operations. A clear picture of your hosting infrastructure (and theirs) will not only will it save you money, but it will also make your company more agile—so, the next time you need to react to market conditions you’ll know what levers to pull.

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About the Author

Jake Fellows is an Associate Product Manager for Liquid Web's Managed Hosting products and services. He has over 10 years of experience involving several fields of the technology industry including hosting, healthcare, and IT system architecture. On his time off, he can be found in front of some form of screen enjoying movies, video games and researching into one of his many technical side projects.